Defining “play” to include any intrinsically valued activity, including games and sports, Suits argues that play is the only activity that allows us to imagine a utopia after the end of all labor and striving for merely instrumental purpose.*22 Suppose that machines have brought the end of work; that material abundance is achieved; that psychology has treated all psychic disturbances; and that all strife and competition is removed from love and admiration, science and philosophy, and art and sex. Just suppose, for the sake of argument. What then would we do with ourselves? Is this post-striving “utopia” even morally attractive? Or as Arthur Schopenhauer put the question,

  Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with their time?*23

  Suits’s answer is that we would play games and sports! We could still play for its own sake. And if some people intrinsically valued doing things now regarded as trades, such as house building, they could do that too, but done as sport, for intrinsic reasons of the building craft. “In addition to hockey, baseball, tennis, and so on, there would also be sports of business administration, jurisprudence, philosophy, production management, motor mechanics, ad, for all practical purposes, infinitum.”

  For Suits, the fact that we can approvingly imagine this form of society shows that the idea of utopia is intelligible to us. And while it won’t happen anytime soon, the thought experiment in the “metaphysics of leisure time” shows the deep meaning of what we often trivialize as “pastimes.” The games and sports we now play may in fact be “intimations of things to come,” “cues to the future” whose “serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation.”*24

  Yet this is unnecessarily utopian. “Pastimes” such as surfing aren’t intimations of things to come. They are, world historically speaking, a consequence of the leisure revolution already begun. Now over seven decades under way, pure capitalism has been long since abandoned. We no longer allocate labor and time simply by the market, as in a pure laissez-faire economy, which before the early twentieth century left most people scarce time beyond work. With the institution of the forty-hour workweek, and then an accumulation of wealth unprecedented in human history, instrumental activities have long ceased to be the whole of life. Most people in the advanced world now have at least a modicum of time for play in games or sports. Many still mainly cope, working to make the best of their unwelcome situation, rather than working as sport, for its own sake. But the possibility of self-transcendence in both play and work is a present reality rather than a utopian dream. The long revolution is not away from capitalism as such, to a postcapitalist “utopia” of the sort Karl Marx thought would invariably come about with the rise of the proletariat. The revolution is within capitalism, and the question is whether and how our social contract might be further adapted in the present century. We return to this in the following chapters.

  For the moment, note a major result of our inquiry up to this point. The surfer’s preferred society, of working less with more time for surfing or hiking or stamp collecting, would not be an unrealistic utopia, at odds with human nature. For Sartre, the difficulty of relaxation is existential, unavoidable. Being is inseparable from active doing in self-creation, seen as a kind of work. Our natures limit the realistic possibilities for culture and society and may well limit the relaxation of work culture. But in the surfer view of human nature, which we’ve now developed, the causes of angst and heavy living are not fixed in our natures. They follow from what we together make of ourselves, in the kind of culture and society we choose. Culture steers our attention, and it can spoil our attunement by encouraging preoccupation with ourselves, our identity, status, and appearance in the eyes of others. Self-escape thus becomes a kind of work. But this is not inevitable; we can transcend ourselves readily, at least in favorable circumstances. The leisure revolution began in the postwar era by calling forth our natural powers of play, in surfing and other self-transcending leisure pursuits. Nothing in our very nature prevented it, and nothing in our natures would keep it from continuing as the present century unfolds.

  Is the Sublime About Us?

  Kant committed surfer blasphemy when he said that “the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime.” The stormy ocean, he says, is merely “horrible.”*25 The sublime is simply the feeling we have in the face of the horrible when we are drawn out of our experience of the ocean itself to thoughts of ourselves. For when we “abandon sensibility” and have “higher” ideas, they turn out to be rather self-involved thoughts of our “superiority over nature.” Kant writes,

  For although we found our own limitation when we considered the immensity of nature…we also found, in our power of reason, a different and nonsensible standard that has [a grasp of] infinity itself…; and since in contrast with this standard everything in nature is small, we found in our mind a superiority over nature itself in its immensity.*26

  Under Kant’s influence, the poet William Wordsworth picked up the theme of superiority and praised the sublime’s egoistically ennobling effect. He alludes to Kant’s comment that the “starry skies above” are one of two things that awe us most (the other being “the moral law within”). He then writes,

  Of a majestic intellect, its acts

  And its possessions, what it has and craves,

  What in itself it is, and would become.

  There I beheld the emblem of a mind

  That feeds upon infinity, that broods

  Over the dark abyss, intent to hear

  Its voices issuing forth to silent light

  In one continuous stream; a mind sustained

  By recognitions of transcendent power,

  In sense conducting to ideal form,

  In soul of more than mortal privilege.*27

  So the sublime is ultimately all about us. The awesome wonder is not the stormy ocean but the observer on the cliff; not the tsunami, but the moral beings swept up in the surge; not the hurricane, but the people watching it in safe horror on TV from their couches.

  Mill reports that he was drawn out of a deep depression by reading Wordsworth’s poems. They allowed him to be excited again about natural beauty and the human love of it:

  What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.*28

  Mill thus found an answer to Schopenhauer’s question about life after the end of work. “When all the greater evils of life shall have been removed,” Mill concluded, we could find a perennial source of happiness with “no connexion with struggle or imperfection.” We could discover it in the beauty of nature.

  Now we are talking! This rings true to surfer experience, yet it rings with no hint of what Kant calls “our superiority over nature.” Surfing is lofty and ennobling precisely for its power to draw us out of ourselves. Kant had it right when he said elsewhere that the “mental attunement” befitting a sublime object is “not a feeling of the sublimity of our own nature” (my italics). What is it like to see the stormy ocean as sublime? A wave peels off, cresting, cracking, powerfully tubing. To surf such a wave is to have a sense of the ocean’s sublimity and the beauty in going along with the flow of its waves. The ocean agitated by storms is part of the raft of material conditions that make waves at our shores. All of which is completely sublime, just in and of itself, really and truly, even when we aren’t actively appreciating it. To sense this is to experience the ocean as sublime, as an apt object of awe and wonder, not just have a feeling about it. Our feelings on a given day, which might be excessive, flat, or out of place, are another matter entirely. But feeling wonderment when it is apt brings a sense of harmony. One’s feelings and the world are aligned, attuned.

  Is the great philosopher confused? The problem is partly that Kant isn’t really after the felt quality of an experience. I see a cup on the table, resting there at a distance, in the ordinary way. What makes this experience possible? What must be true of our minds such that we could experience an object in space and time in that ordinary cup-there-on-the-table way? Kant’s answer was to lay out the “transcendental” conditions that lie beneath my ordinary experience, which must hold for it to be possible. He thus posited deep super-sensuous “categories” of human understanding (time, space, causality), which we all operate with innately. We all more or less see the cup there on the table in the same way, because the basic categories of our minds construct our experience in the same way. But the sublime is different. It can’t be “contained in any sensuous form”—can’t be experienced like a cup on a table or its properties—because it is a different part of the background structure of any sensory experience, what he called an “idea of reason.”

  So I’m guessing Kant thought our experience of the sublime would lead back to us because his transcendental philosophy bled into his description of our experience. That philosophy (which is sublime in itself) was hugely influential in Western thought. Yet I think Kant would have to agree that none of it is plain in ordinary experience. It isn’t part and parcel of a surfer’s experience of what it’s like to be in, and palpably sense, the ocean and its roaring waves, when you’re right in front of them. It took philosophers like Edmund Husserl, the early phenomenologist whom Sartre followed, to get us to just look at the surface, at the intrinsic character of our experience as it comes to us. So if we’re sticking to what it’s like to be a surfer, we can leave the sublime in the waves.

  On the other hand, Kant would call waves “beautiful,” straight up. So the sublime is more like the beautiful in Kant’s own account, which does nicely fit surfer experience. The sight of a wave can bring disinterested pleasure, the sort of enjoyment that comes from the free play or free harmony of one’s imagination and understanding. That spontaneous enjoyment is potentially apt, or appropriate to its object, because it lays claim to being “universally valid,” or at least “communicable.” There’s no proof to be given among those who disagree about beauty, of course. Yet there are reasons to be exchanged, which one could bring up in a discussion. Maybe I say Jackson Pollock’s paintings are beautiful, while you say he’s just some guy slinging paint (to prove it is possible to sling paint in just that way). We then discuss whether the various features of this painting make an organic unity (in a phrase used by G. E. Moore, the early-twentieth-century analytical theorist of the good). If you weren’t seeing the beauty in surfing already, I could point to its various features—the crystalline tube, the surfer’s flowing attunement, the manifest harmony between person and nature. I could aptly say that for those reasons you really ought to enjoy it, disinterestedly, whether or not you care to do anything else about it. It’d be nothing like a proof, but also nothing like arguing about the relative merits of one flavor of ice cream over another, which really is a matter of taste.

  The surfer watching a grinding tube, which is peeling off without a drop of water out of place, is always an aesthetic objectivist. Certain waves are sublimely beautiful. Their value is in that respect objective, though not in the otherworldly sense of Plato’s eternal Forms. The crucial thing is that aesthetic judgment is not a simple matter of opinion, feeling, or taste, being true only “in the eye of the beholder,” with no greater authority. The “beautiful” and the “sublime” are not just names for certain pleasurable feelings, which waves just happen to induce. Waves are sublimely beautiful, themselves, quite aside from the fact that surfers like to surf them, or find them agreeable for surfing purposes. Which is to say the pleasures of waves and surfing are appropriately enjoyed, attended to, and engaged with imaginatively, even when we aren’t in fact paying attention to them. That, right there, is all the objectivity a surfer needs. The aesthetic truth of the matter need only be invariant with respect to ways our particular thoughts or feelings might have been different.*29 Even if I didn’t find the peeling wave agreeable, it would still be sublimely beautiful. Someone who disagreed, who just couldn’t quite catch it, would be making a kind of mistake. The error might be corrected, by his paying closer, steadier attention. But the error would be one of perception, of not quite sensing what waves and surfing are manifestly like in their sumptuous, sensuous reality.*30

  Is the Surfing Experience Religious?

  Sigmund Freud, the philosopher and early psychologist, writes of “oceanic feeling,” or a “feeling of oneness with the universe.”*31 Though he says he can’t quite discover this feeling in himself, a colleague told him about it and said it was a defining part of religious experience, which he and millions of others feel daily, as “a sensation of eternity, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded, something ‘oceanic.’ ” Freud presumes this is the same feeling another writer described as “out of this world we cannot fall,” a sense of “belonging inseparably to the world as a whole.”

  Freud, being Freud, notes this to debunk the human impetus for self-transcendence, especially in religion. He writes,

  I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.*32

  Freud never gave any actual argument against the existence of God. He simply assumed God’s unreality and proposed to explain how religion could have emerged anyway (in threats to the ego). But of course God might also exist. In which case Freud’s story wouldn’t be necessary: the ocean could then be a revelatory medium, with surfing as a form of religious experience.

  Some Christian surfers do report a sense of God in surfing. Yet it is fair to say this is not quite the general surfer experience, heathen and rebel alike. Surfers seem no more or less religious than their cultures or subcultures of origin, sociologically speaking. Many of them—especially in Australia—aren’t especially disposed to mystical or spiritual awareness, but certainly do appreciate what is distinctively wonderful about riding waves.

  Are they simply missing something? Rudolf Otto, the German Lutheran theologian, called our sense of the divine a sense of the “numinous,” a feeling of awe in the presence of the wholly Other. That also goes beyond the surfer feeling, which is limited to a sense of dependence upon what is immanent in nature, often with a sense of close, harmonious connection to bigger things. The relational intimacy to God of the mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila might be a closer fit; God is not wholly Other but close in one’s immediate experience, even in routine business. Yet this still seems too transcendent for the general surfer experience. The relational connection in surfing feels grand, or wonderful, not because it takes us beyond the universe. What you feel is connected to more of that universe in its local and liquid manifestation. There’s the water’s undulating restlessness. Its wetness. The blend of sky and sea, which merge into something larger, something grander than any single perception of this or that, over here or over there; one senses something like the whole space, in which the kelp brushes one’s leg, the clouds shift in the wind, the next wave rolls in, all at once. Yet the sense of dependence upon something bigger doesn’t plainly reach beyond the sky, into the heavens, into a supersensible, supernatural realm. The ocean feels plenty big enough.

  For Baruch Spinoza, one of the first modern Jewish philosophers, the surfer draws nearer to God, or rather a divinized nature, or naturalized God, which comes to the same thing. Which is it? Being a pantheist, Spinoza is deliberately ambiguous, speaking of “God, or Nature.”*33 He writes, “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists.”*34 In which case one should surf a pleasing “sport”:

  It is a feature of a wise man that he makes use of things and delights in them as much as he can (though not to the point of disgust, for that is not to feel delight)….[H]e renews and refreshes himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with scents, the beauty of plants in bloom, dress, music, sports, the theatre, and other things of this sort.*35

  This is not simple hedonism; the delightful pleasures bring genuine self-transcendence. Although he identifies God with Nature, Spinoza still tries to do justice to the traditional idea that God is the most perfect being. He defines pleasure in terms of a transition to a state of greater perfection. (“The more we are affected by pleasure, the greater the perfection to which we pass; that is, the more it is necessary that we participate in the divine nature.”) So when we experience pleasures of surfing, we become more perfect and hence more like God.

  So surfing is at once natural and spiritual. If a surfer already subscribed to Spinoza’s pantheism, I suppose he or she could so experience God, or Nature, in riding a wave. But again nothing so totalizingly metaphysical seems to come along with the general surfer experience, which needn’t spiritualize oceanic feeling at all. Surfing seems open to spiritualization but doesn’t supply it by itself. The surfer would also have to accept a philosophy or theology or world picture that brings a spiritual gestalt.

  Freud overstated his own point when he called oceanic feeling a “feeling of oneness with the universe,” or of “belonging inseparably to the world as a whole.” The surfer feeling isn’t even so totalizing over the natural order. When surfers get really dialed in on a good day or wave, and cosmic matters are being contemplated over a beer or a spliff, it can indeed seem arbitrary to draw sharp lines around that to which you were or were not attuned. The ocean is vast, and when the wave you just surfed at a California beach was whipped up thousands of miles away by a storm two weeks before, you can feel grateful to be so fortunately placed that the elements did coalesce, just so, just as they had to, for the wave you just surfed to have been surfed as it was. But you wouldn’t feel any special connection to the Andromeda Galaxy, or to inland China, or to the wild shores of West Africa, not without pondering a map of the globe or our neighborhood in outer space. What one feels connected to is more diffuse, neither localized nor so well defined as the world “as a whole.”